California

So, what's so complex about living in California? If you've seen our comments about Alaska you will begin to appreciate how relaxed the living there is in comparison to California's go-getter attitudes.

It may not actually be more complex, it is just that living in California requires a different set of attitudes and skills. We haven't had to take a ferry to get anywhere in California, but we didn't have toll bridges ten lanes wide in Alaska. Ten years in Alaska offered us no earthquakes but within ten months of moving back to California we were in the midst of a big one. We had no floods while we lived in Alaska (well... some people say that 156 inches of rain per year is a continuous flood) but we have seen two major floods here in the past three years. When we moved from a California city of 110,000 population to a town of 5,000 our daughter complained that she was terrified to attend high school here because there are no police officers at the school, unlike her previous school which had three uniformed and two plain-clothes officers on campus all day.

OK, so maybe it's no more complex than living anywhere in modern America, but California is different. I have no idea who said it first, and it is entirely possible they weren't talking about California, but my experience tells me that "California is not just another state, it is a state of mind."